4 Top Collaboration Tools to Choose From

Nowadays, workplaces need more collaboration tools than ever, and there are plenty of options available to help them.

Picking through them can be cumbersome. Do you need a full-service office management suite? Are you also looking for social media? Or you should go for project management software with collaboration capabilities?

Sometimes, you feel that you have specific needs to be covered by a tool. It is not easy to keep up with all the latest tools available in the market. So it simply means that the options are not clear cut. Or you can say that it is really hard to start, let alone assess the pros and cons of each tool.

Don’t worry. Here we have researched several of the quality workplace collaboration tools available.

In this piece of writing, we have outlined what makes each collaboration tool great for different types of business. And you can decide which the suitable one for your business is.

Microsoft Office 365:

Microsoft has been serving businesses with cutting edge applications since 1980s. Office 365 has been designed to cater the collaboration needs of the owners. Being delivered through the users, it is a suite of various MS products like Exchange Online for email, SharePoint Online for collaboration, Skype for video conferencing and other MS office apps. It is available in three packages: Business, Essentials, and Business Premium. Cloud based versions of Office apps are available in all three packages, but desktop versions are given in only the Business and Business Premium plans. The Essentials and Business Premium plan also include Skype, Yammer and MS teams.

MS Office 365 is great for midsize business with a dedicated management or project management.

G-Suite:G-Suite, also known as Google Apps for Business, is a dedicated cloud based collaboration tool. It includes various features like Gmail, Docs, Drive, Sheets and Slides. These features are the counterparts of Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. G-Suite lets users to work on both PCs and Macs. The users can work on files simultaneously. They can share files with both external and internal people in the company.

G-Suite is available in versions like Basic, Business and Enterprise. All versions encompass essential applications and collaboration tools. However, each plan comes with a different storage—the Basic plan with 30GB cloud storage while the Business and Enterprise plans give unlimited storage along with additional features.

G-Suite is great for startups and small businesses that usually don’t have dedicated IT team.

Slack:Counted among the most used workplace collaboration tools, Slack is arguably the only app providing chat, video conferencing and file sharing. As an added bonus, Slack’s basic plan is free. Generally, Slack offers a centralized and searchable route for communication and sharing. It can be integrated with other business applications like Gmail, Jira, Salesforce, Git Hub and Google Hangouts, thanks to its exhaustive app directory. This way, you can enjoy seamless data transfer and file sharing across the apps.

The free version is suitable for small teams requiring a limited feature set. As you scale up your needs, you have to go for advance version of Slack.

HipChatHipChat is the best match for Slack. Like Slack, it is a centralized communication platform facilitating chatting, video conferencing and file sharing. It is available as both standalone app and a suite of other Atlassian products like JIRA software, JIRA Service Desk, JIRA Core and Confluence.

HipChat is available into two plans, free basic version and a paid plan known as HipChat Plus. The basic plan offers group and one-to-one chat, guest access, file sharing and 5 GB storage. The paid plan comes with the features like video chat, screen sharing and unlimited file storage.

HipChat is great for small teams looking for cheaper yet effective communication tool.

So these are some effective collaboration tools that include almost everything to cater your needs. Make sure to learn their policies and price structure before installing them.

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About Ng Wei Khang

Ng Wei Khang, CEO at a Singapore based IT consultancy company, APIXEL IT Support, has been operational for over 8 years from now. Apixel provides fixed price IT Support Services with unlimited packages that includes small business server setup, Cloud Solution Configuration, Network management and Data security & Theft prevention. The company also provides expert IT consultancy to SMEs in Singapore.